Rhône, Saône, Fourvière, Perrache station: there's no doubt we're in Lyon,
more precisely in the premises of Chemin de Fer Privé de la Mulatière whose windows face the confluence
of the 2 rivers.
Today we're visiting this club and discovering its large HO scale layout.
Welcome to Aiguillages!
La Mulatière is a municipality bordering Lyon, you may have passed the premises of the club without knowing it
as they're situated along highway A7, a few kilometers after exiting the Fourvière tunnel when driving south.
Several sources are accepted to explain the name of the municipality,
we're going to choose the one that suits us most: 'Mulatière' could come from the fact that,
as it is situated along the banks of the Rhône, a towpath was used by mules hauling boats on the river.
That's the version model makers chose.
In front of the former city hall, they reproduced the elected representatives as mules.
This joke is well received by the latter who know its origins.
On the fixed layout, the bridges of La Mulatière were reproduced
only a few dozen meters away from the real ones that we can see from the windows of the club.
They include a road bridge and a railway bridge.
Their story has been rough.
The first bridge that was built there was washed away by a flood less than a year after its opening.
It was rebuilt and seriously damaged about 10 years after, during the siege of Lyon.
A new one was built at the same time as the Mulatière tunnel in 1820
for a railway to connect Lyon to Saint-Etienne.
It's a mixed road/rail bridge that was also washed away by a flood in 1840.
Other suspended and temporary bridges were built without lasting very long,
as well as a new bridge that was dilapidated and overloaded at the beginnning of the 20th century
and road and rail bridges that were built between the 2 wars and that were bombed in 1944.
The Rhône is not a long and quiet river!
Thankfully, the story of Chemin de Fer Privé de la Mulatière hasn't been this tumultuous,
even though the club has to dismantle a layout before making a new one in its current premises
when the Aquarium de Lyon was built a few hundred meters from there.
We were a section of the CJC which is a cultural center for young people,
we were 4 train and model making enthusiasts, we had no room at home to make a layout
and one day we thought it would be nice to pool our talents and build a layout together
so we started making our first layout in La Mulatière at Paul Nas middle school that is behind the city hall
in 1981 we made a layout like this one with sceneries, a roundhouse, etc.
We were not using digital control, we didn't have the same technologies as we do now, but we had lots of fun!
That's how it started.
When the Aquarium arrived we had to move and the city hall found these premises for us, so we got here in 2000,
we carried out lots of rehabilitation works as unfortunately it was all degraded and squatted,
then we started building this layout with metal plankings and we started making the sceneries, laying the tracks,
as any other layout and then other members joined us, they said they liked our project and that's how we grew.
We were quite fast to build this layout as we were more experienced compared to when we made the first one
and also we got very talented people that helped us, including by working on the sceneries.
Of course we wanted to represent La Mulatière as we're here, that's our district with the city hall,
and as Lyon is our city we wanted to represent the most emblematic places in Lyon,
including Perrache and Fourvière with the funicular and the Gallo-Roman Museum.
There are several stations in Lyon, and Perrache, that is the closest to La Mulatière,
was chosen when model makers had to pick one to reproduce on the layout.
It's the closest station and to me it's the most beautiful as Brotteaux station doesn't exist anymore,
and as Perrache is between the Rhône and the Saône it looks nice with the rivers on each side,
there's Place Carnot behind it with its buildings that still exist thankfully and that are well known
like Brasserie Georges and château Perrache, to us the Lyon region was quite easy to reproduce.
A section of the layout is dedicated to this reproduction of Lyon, the other one represents an imaginary place
taking visitors from rivers to mountains in landscapes inspired by the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region.
It's completely imaginary, we still wanted to get the looks of the villages of our region, so golden stones,
we have an ocher village, and one with our HOm model, our metric line that is more inspired by Pérouges.
These 2 layouts are independent, which means trains leave from the Paris direction
and reappear in the Marseille direction, they leave again on the Paris side and reappear on the Marseille side
and actually in the meantime they travel around the layout twice by using different routes.
We have a hidden station that creates the illusion of a bigger layout: a train leaves and shunts
while another one passes before it and the first train reappears once 2 or 3 trains passed it,
this way trains vary and it creates the illusion of a larger layout.
The fourth side of this layout is where visitors start discovering it
and where model makers create their trains.
In a corner, Vaise station and its workshops were represented.
Along the layout, several animated scenes were spread.
We wanted the public to interact with the layout, including children, during our open days
and we realized trains were nice by the most important part is the life that is going on around them,
we wanted to make this layout a large painting and we wanted people to feel like they could shrink and enter it
to take a walk in these sceneries, that's why we created these small scenes, to create a certain atmosphere
and there are some winks here and there, things we can't see in our daily life like the ghost,
but this is mostly for children and our goal was to have the public interact with the layout and have fun!
The layout covers a surface area of 50 m² in 3 rooms, and has 300 meters of track.
One of the reasons why the club chose its name 'Chemin de Fer Privé de la Mulatière'
is to be able to operate any kind of train without worrying about what could happen on the real SNCF network.
The club chose to be the owner of the structure of the layout without owning any rolling stocks.
Its members are free to bring whatever they want to see running,
and to build trains even if it means distorting reality a little bit.
I don't know a lot about the SNCF, I love trains and I buy things during fairs,
I dismantle them and I rebuild them while paying extra attention to details for locomotives, wagons, etc.
and I make trains we can't find in shops, also you saw boats, they're from Riva Aquarama,
I made them out of resin and then the chandlery is made of strings, pins, plastic,
recovered materials like these.
On this day, Jean-Claude also operated a train made for the shooting of a film
as well as one carrying helicopters.
I just made it to have fun, as it's quite rare to see trains carrying helicopters without tarpaulin.
But the point here was to see them.
During my career I did various things including aerial photography
so I reproduced the helicopter I used to make millions and millions of pictures for postcards etc.,
they're Belgian 47G, originally their scale was 1:72 but I changed it to 1:87 so it could match the HO wagons.
Other then this large fixed layout, Chemin de Fer Privé de la Mulatière also has HO scale exhibition layouts
that can't be stored in the premises of the club for lack of space, so we can only see them at exhibitions.
There's also a very active N section that Gilbert created.
It's a significant part of our activity, of course it's more recent then the HO section
but it's getting quite old as about 30 years ago I went to a meeting with various clubs
and I met a member of this club whom I asked if it would be interesting to join their N section
and he answered they didn't have one so I decided to still join the club, they agreed, I was accepted,
and some of the members were happy to join me in the creation of some N models,
little by little we started making layouts that we exhibited and that's how the section was born.
So we have an exhibition layout that we call 'Europe', it's about 7 or 8 meters long and 2 modules large,
and we got a layout that was supposed to be destroyed, it belonged to an engineer living near the German border
in the Lorraine region, he had a stunning layout but he was getting too old to exhibit it,
and this masterpiece was about to be dismantled so we got it and we're starting to exhibit it, little by little,
it has lots of small elements, it should reach 17 meters by 10 when it's done!
That's how important it is.
I'll show you the first section of this layout very soon in Aiguillages
as the members of the club already rehabilitated it and exhibited it for the first time in a long time.
Chemin de fer Privé de la Mulatière usually opens its doors each 3rd Saturday of the month
from 2 pm to 6 pm, you can check their website to confirm the opening dates.
Next week in Aiguillages we'll talk about 'Autour d'Axe les Thermes',
a layout made by the Rail Miniature Ariégeois club.
2018 will bring some novelties to Aiguillages: a new site on January 17th,
Aiguillonautes VIP are now called Aiguillonautes Première classe
and the newsletter is now an Aiguillolettre.
I'll tell you about some other changes at the end of January while lauching the Aiguilloton
which will allow you to confirm your support to Aiguillages
by contributing to the financing of the reports to come.
I wish you an excellent year 2018!
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